2. accountability and transparency that need improvement. And we can engage with integrity to ensure the measurements better match what is actually happening on the ground. We can also constructively engage with genuine bodies that measure corruption and domestic civil society groups to assist us in our efforts to keep improving corruption control. We do need a new approach as the perception-focused existing measurement formulae may be inaccurate, or even biased, we cannot deny that the corruption problem is real. Railing against methodologies will not change the negative picture they continue to create. We should therefore work together to build an acceptable formula built on a methodology that as best as possible captures prevalence levels and does not discount effort but strongly incorporates it. Indexes are important to us as they provide ACAs and civil society actors a way to provide a credible reflection of the situation in their countries. It also gives all of us a powerful rhetorical tool to call on governments to do more. The yearly release of the new index will provide an opportunity to remind ourselves of the persistence of corruption and the need to take more robust steps to reverse its grip on countries' development. Thank you.

1. Speech by Francis Ben Kaifala Esq., the Commissioner, Anti-Corruption Commission of the Republic of Sierra Leone at the 2nd Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement in the United States of America Mr. Chairman, Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, I bring you warm greetings from the President and People of Sierra Leone who welcome the plan to re-imagine and redefine the methodologies and related tools of measuring corruption globally. Transparency International (TI) released its annual Corruption Perception Index earlier this year. The CPI is quite controversial, particularly in developing countries that typically fare poorly on the index. When I was a Board Member of the African Union Advisory Board on Corruption (AUABC) and President of the Network of Anti-Corruption Institutions in West Africa (NACIWA), it seemed that every time the CPI came up in our meetings, the typical reaction ranged from disapproval to outrage, with many challenging the legitimacy and authenticity of the index. More broadly, many African government officials and some anti-corruption campaigners see the CPI, as well as TI’s accompanying commentaries, as part of a purpose-driven smear campaign. I agree that most corruption measurement sources like the CPI or Afrobarometer have significant flaws and limitations, which are familiar enough that they need not be rehearsed at length: Firtly they measure perception and not actual prevalence; and perceptrions can be subjective and potentially unreliable. The underlying sources in the CPI formula are not always sufficiently transparent as to the qualifications of the “experts” who assign scores, and the CPI does not cover some of the crucial issues that antigraft fighters focus on, such as tax fraud, money laundering, illicit financial flows, etc. And I share concerns about the way the CPI is sometimes used, by TI and other parties, to paint an inaccurate and sometimes unfair picture of how well anticorruption fighters are doing their job, particularly in Africa. This is why this particular project is important to my country. The existing corruption measurement tools and indexes have proven frustrating for ACAs and governments. For example, influential indexes like the CPI, which relies on desk reviews and mostly unidentified experts, gives our countries low scores and discount the efforts we are putting into controling corruption, many will be right to see it as a machinated attack. It often discourages good work ACAs and some governments are doing. A good measurement tool will help us study what other countries that are faring better in the indexes may doing and seek to replicate or better them in our respective countries. We can review country-specific information and data in the yearly releases to identify areas of